This month, the best Chinese New Year gift for a businessman fighting the economic crisis is a toy ox — a charm for prosperity as China’s economy battles a historic low.

On Thursday, Beijing revealed that economic growth for 2008 had slipped to nine per cent, with a 6.8 per cent slowdown in the fourth quarter. Nine per cent would be one of India’s best runs. But for China, it was the lowest pace since 2001 and the first single-digit growth since 2003.

In 2007, China grew at 13 per cent and leapfrogged to become the world’s third-largest economy.

So the atheist Chinese are hoping the year of the ox will usher a change of fortune. The ox follows the rat as the second of 12 animals in the Chinese zodiac. It signifies prosperity through diligence and hard work.

“I sell about 15 pieces of stuffed ox every day,’” Chen Tao, who runs a closet-sized store in an eight-century-old alley, told HT. “People want an ox with the Chinese character of money and fortune on its back, as a gift for businessmen.”

While this correspondent chatted with Chen, a Chinese woman spent over 200 yuan (about Rs 1,400) on red and blue toy oxen for the New Year holiday starting on Sunday. “Let there be ox,” said a sign on the door of a bar in the historic alley.

In the building housing HT’s Beijing bureau, office-goers in business suits are seen walking with the stuffed toy with horns.

A struggling new bank branch has propped a life-size cutout of a trendy couple with ox and cow faces.

The flagging US coffee chain Starbucks hopes for prosperity with its latest China product: a stuffed ox priced at over Rs 1,100.

Internationally, Israel wants a smackdown on Iran. Medvedev and Putin want U.S. Missile Defense out of Europe. And others are lining up too.

Americans want prosperity and jobs. GM and Chryler want all the auto bailout they can get and the UAW wants a raise.

President-elect Obama, blissfully in the Hawaiian nirvana as we write, faces a long line of seekers looking for goodies this Christmas and next year.

Can he possibly deliver?

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From Thomas Friedman
The New York Times

We’ve indulged ourselves for too long with tax cuts that we can’t afford, bailouts of auto companies that have become giant wealth-destruction machines, energy prices that do not encourage investment in 21st-century renewable power systems or efficient cars, public schools with no national standards to prevent illiterates from graduating and immigration policies that have our colleges educating the world’s best scientists and engineers and then, when these foreigners graduate, instead of stapling green cards to their diplomas, we order them to go home and start companies to compete against ours.

….

America still has the right stuff to thrive. We still have the most creative, diverse, innovative culture and open society — in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new ideas with speed and to implement them through global collaboration is the most important competitive advantage. China may have great airports, but last week it went back to censoring The New York Times and other Western news sites. Censorship restricts your people’s imaginations. That’s really, really dumb. And that’s why for all our missteps, the 21st century is still up for grabs.

John Kennedy led us on a journey to discover the moon. Obama needs to lead us on a journey to rediscover, rebuild and reinvent our own backyard.

Thirty years ago this month, China’s communist leaders launched an economic revolution, opening the door to free market reforms and foreign trade — though not to political change.

The new era began with a Communist Party gathering on Dec. 18, 1978, that endorsed small-scale private farming, the first step toward abandoning the late leader Mao Zedong’s vision of communal agriculture and industry.

China’s economy has since grown into the world’s fourth-largest behind the U.S., Japan and Germany, and annual per capita income has soared to about 19,000 yuan ($2,760) last year, up from just 380 yuan in 1978.

Above: The Shanghai skyline

Along with private enterprise and capital markets have come greater prosperity and stability than ever before.

By ELAINE KURTENBACH, Associated Press Writer

Virtually all Chinese families now have at least one television and, in the cities, a washing machine — rare items three decades ago. Some 15 million families own private cars, and many Chinese also own their own homes.

“Nowadays, we worry instead about eating too well rather than not eating enough,” says Guo Linchun, 78, retired music teacher in Beijing. “Now, living standards have improved so much, we see not only televisions, so many people even own cars.”

But with modern industries come many other modern ills: pollution, industrial accidents and product safety scandals. And China‘s heavy reliance on exports and foreign investment ensures that the uncertainties now afflicting the global economy are haunting the Chinese as well.

An ethnic Uighur sits under a poster of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games on a street in Xinjiang’s famed Silk Road city of Kashgar in China’s far northwestern area.(AFP/File/Peter Parks)